&grow is a productivity tool for professionals who want to invest in self enrichment but can’t find the time, or are overwhelmed to do so.
&grow adds events, articles, and more to users’ calendars automatically, based on their learning preferences and their availability.
Who among us hasn’t experienced FOMO around industry trends and discussions, and even world events?
For many, despite a strong desire to stay in the loop, the overwhelming amount of resources can result in information overload and anxiety, and ironically, the fear of being left behind can be immobilizing.
Having struggled with these feelings myself, I wasn’t fully aware of just how much they affect others until I began mentoring younger designers.
To understand the commonality of this issue, I created a Google Form survey. I decided to focus on smaller and more familiar groups of people, therefore I shared the survey across Designers Facebook and WhatsApp groups, asking designers about their habits and satisfaction with self learning and enrichment.
Out of 44 UX Designers…
Are unhappy with the amount of knowledge and connections they’re acquiring. 50% of them are Seniors
Say their biggest pain point with keeping up with events and news in their industry is lack of time
Keep up with goals they set themselves in their calendar
To give myself a better visual of the product, I designed the sign-up process for Growthbuddy, despite it not being part of the MVP. I kept in mind that the design might change as the product is tested.
The sign-up flow is simple:
And that’s when it hit me – what if I could create a tool that collects articles from different websites based on the user’s preferences and adds them to their calendar when they’re free?
This way, I not only save the time and frustration that would go into scavenging for articles between the different resources, but I also, in a way, ‘make’ time for the users to read them.
Not sure how to go about building such a tool, I reached out to my trusted friend, ChatGPT.
After turning to sources like ChatGPT, Stackoverflow, and Github to understand the rough amount of effort and skills required to build an MVP to test on a few users, I asked a DevOps expert and friend, Dror Nir, to help me write a plan to build a plan.
Together, we put together a solid plan including Google Sheets as a database for users’ and articles’ data, Google Forms for the signup process, and Apps Script (Javascript) as the engine behind all the automations needed, from gathering the information to injecting events into one’s calendar.
“>Similar to many passion projects, &grow’s verdict ends as I run out of resource and knowledge for the time being. When the time is right, I’ll come back with more experience and a fresh perspective.
In 2021 I took the lead on redesigning the main navigation of our SaaS platform, Voltax.
Leading the project consisted of managing, presenting, co-researching,
co-ideating, and co-testing, as well as design and hand-off.
Voltax, a SaaS platform developed by Minute Media, offers content publishers a Video Library that is at the heart of its efficient video content creation and management system.
